Intel's Puma 6 system on a chip is a popular choice in modem provided by ISPs across the western world and if you have recently upgraded your broadband modem you may have noticed an undesirable side effect. There is an issue with the chip which is causing bursts of high latency, ruining video streaming and gaming for those affected by the issue. There is good news, The Register confirmed with Intel that a fix is forthcoming and you should expect your ISP to push out a firmware update soon, hopefully not while you are in the middle of something important.

"Intel's Puma 6 chipset, used in gigabit broadband modems around the world, suffers from latency jitter so bad it ruins online gaming and other real-time connections."

Introduction and First Impressions

The GENOME is the world’s first computer case with an integrated liquid-cooling system, and this unique design allows users to simply drop in the main system components and have a complete system with liquid cooling loop (and with very little effort).

“One of the first things many of us look at when considering the purchase of a new case is whether it will accommodate the cooling subsystem that we’d like to install in our next build. Can you install big enough radiators? Is there room in the main interior space for the reservoir and pump that you have your eye on? How will it look when everything is put together? To improve PC user experience is why DEEPCOOL comes up with GENOME, which is a PC hardware component, consists of an ATX PC case and an extreme liquid cooling system.”

When I first heard about the GENOME I was nonplussed - wondering how I would even go about reviewing at since it defies conventional classification. It’s as much a CPU cooler as a case, and DEEPCOOL calls this simply a “cooling system”. But however you label it there is no doubt that this novel concept has the potential to produce a polished build with a minimal effort (if it is well-designed, of course).

If you have switched cases as often as I do (no one should - I do it once every week or two), you might appreciate any sort of labor-saving design in a case. As a reviewer moving a test system from one enclosure to the next, I just want an easy build with adequate clearance and good cable management (these requirements are true for most normal people as well). Some cases are much easier to build in that others, and I was very curious to see how something which sounds quite complex would actually come together.

HP recently introduced a new convertible tablet for students. Built to be a bit more ruggedized than the consumer Pavilion model, the new HP ProBook X360 11G Education Edition is an 11” 2-in-1 laptop weighing in at 3.19 pounds, 0.78 inches thick, and designed to pass the MIL-STD 810G specification test with a spill resistant keyboard, shock and minor drop tolerance, and keyboard keys that are difficult to rip off (heh).

HP’s new convertible uses the same 360-degree hinge design as the existing Pavilion x360 notebooks which allows the user to bend the display all the way back so that it can be used as a tablet with the keyboard on the underside. Unlike the older consumer versions though, it appears HP has slightly upgraded things.

On the outside the notebook is dark gray with black around the display and has a more business aesthetic while keeping the curves of the consumer model. The display is an 11” SVA panel with LED backlighting that is protected by Gorilla Glass 4. There is a 720p front facing webcam above the display and a 1080p camera on the keyboard that can be used while in tablet or tent modes while using the display as a viewfinder. Further, HP managed to cram what looks like a decent sized keyboard sans numpad and a trackpad that supports multi touch gestures

The display supports both multi touch and digitizer input using the optional Active Pen which is nice to see and a feature I had wanted to see on the Pavilion x360 when i was looking for a replacement for my old convertible (I'm still looking heh).

Internally, the ProBook X360 11G EE is powered by one of two possible Apollo Lake SoCs: a dual core Celeron N3350 running at 1.1GHz and up to 2.4GHz boost and HD Graphics 500 or a quad core Pentium N4200 clocked at 1.1GHz base and up to 2.5GHz with an Intel HD 505 GPU. Regardless of the processor choice, the convertible also includes 8GB of DDR3L-1600 memory and a 64GB eMMC drive that can be upgraded to a 128GB ot 256GB M.2 SSD for better performance. Ditching the 500GB spinning rust drive of the consumer version is a good thing and is likely what helped HP get the ruggedized specifications.

Networking is handled by Intel dual band 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.2, and Realtek-powered Gigabit Ethernet. HP claims up to 11 hours of battery life.

The ProBook X360 11G Education Edition comes with a 3 year warranty and starts at $329 with availability expected in January. Unfortunately, the convertible will initially only be available to educational institutions and HP partners though eventually you should be able to pick one up through a reseller. Another possible wrinkle is that the notebooks come preloaded with HP’s School Pack software which has software for students that lets a teacher do lesson planning, desktop sharing, and a student social network among other things. Of course if your school does not use this platform it is just more pre-installed software taking up resources. On the other hand, they do come with Windows 10 Pro rather than Home so that is something at least.

I wouldn't mind getting my hands on one to see how it feels as it sounds like it is more solidly built than the non education edition version.

Piranha Games, known for the free-to-play MechWarrior Online, has just announced MechWarrior 5: Merceneries. The first thing I noticed is that they revived the Merceneries subtitle, used twice before with expansion packs to MechWarrior 2 and MechWarrior 4. The second thing I noticed is that it now runs on Unreal Engine 4, despite MechWarrior Online being based on CryEngine.

The third thing I noticed is that, while it’s a bit of a meme to start MechWarrior things with the mech powering up, the video actually begins with the pilot on foot, walking through the hangar. I’m wondering whether this will be expanded upon in the gameplay or narrative. I don’t really see how it could work, but it seems like a fair amount of effort for no real intent. Yes, I’ve played MechAssault 2, but it seems highly unlikely that anything like that will happen.

MechWarrior 5 takes place in 3015, which means that it will have a very small subset of the weapons and equipment that you would see in, say, MechWarrior 3 (~3060) and MechWarrior 4 (~3063). There probably will not be ER weapons, pulse lasers, gauss rifles, ECM, LBX autocannons, or anything like that. I would be surprised to see anything more than standard lasers, PPCs, short-range missiles, long-range missiles, machine guns, and standard autocannons. It will be an interesting change of pace.

MechWarrior 5 also might be single-player only. The teaser site seems to suggest that MechWarrior Online will continue to be updated, which I interpret to mean that it will be its multiplayer companion.

About half of a year ago, LibRetro added Vulkan support to their Nintendo 64 renderer. This allowed them to do things like emulate the console’s hardware rasterization in software, and do so as an asynchronous shader, circumventing limitations in their OpenGL path trying to emulate the console’s offbeat GPU.

They have now turned their sights (“for the lulz”) to the original PlayStation, creating a Vulkan back-end for emulators like Beetle PSX.

The fairly long blog post discusses how the PlayStation is designed in detail, making it an interesting read for anyone curious. One point that I found particularly interesting is how the video memory is configured as a single, 1MB, 2D array (1024x512x16-bit). At this time, texture resolution was quite small, and frame buffers were between 256x224 and 640x480, so that’s a lot of room to make a collage out of your frame and all textures in the scene, but it’s still odd to think about a console imposing such restrictions now that we’re spoiled by modern GPUs.

In terms of performance, the developer claims that modern GPUs can handle 8k resolutions with relative ease, and four-digit FPS at lower resolutions.

Move Over T150...

The Thrustmaster TMX was released this past summer to address the Xbox One ecosystem with an affordable, entry level force-feedback wheel. This is essentially the Xbox version of the previously reviewed Thrustmaster T150 for the PS3/PS4. There are many things that these two wheels have in common, but there are a few significant differences as well. The TMX is also PC compatible, which is what I tested it upon.

A no-nonsense box design that lets the buyer know exactly what systems this product is for.

The Basics

The TMX is priced at an MSRP of $199. Along with the T150 this is truly an entry level FFB wheel with all of the features that racers desire. The wheel itself is 11” wide and the base is compact, with a solid feel. Unlike the T150, the TMX is entirely decked out in multiple shades of black. The majority of the unit is a dark, slick black while the rubber grips have a matte finish. The buttons on the wheel are colored appropriately according to the Xbox controller standards (yellow, blue, green, and red). The other buttons are black with a couple of them having some white stenciling on them.

The motor in this part is not nearly as powerful as what we find in the TX and T300rs base units. Those are full pulley based parts with relatively strong motors while the TMX is a combination gear and pulley system. This provides a less expensive setup than the full pulley systems of the higher priced parts, but it still is able to retain pretty strong FFB. Some of the more subtle effects may be lost due to the setup, but it is far and away a better solution than units that feature bungee cords and basic rumble functionality.

The back shows a basic diagram of the mixed pulley and geared subsystem for force-feedback.

The wheel features a 12 bit optical pickup sensor for motion on the wheel. This translates into 4096 values through 360 degrees of rotation. This is well below the 16 bit units of the TX and T300rs bases, but in my racing I did not find it to be holding me back. Yes, the more expensive units are more accurate and utilize the Hall Effect rather than an optical pickup, but the TMX provides more than enough precision for the vast majority of titles out there. The pedals look to feature the same 10 bit resolution that most other Thrustmaster pedals offer, or about 1024 values for several inches of travel.

Instead of using sleeve bearings, ball bearings or fluid dynamic bearings, the Corsair ML series relies on magnetic levitation to deal with the friction created by a spinning fan. The fans are available in 120mm and 140mm sizes, with blue, red or white LEDS, or none if you prefer. The fans use a 4-pin PWM connection to allow you to control their speed and should be compatible with any case, heatsink or radiator you might want to use them with. Techgage tried them out in a Cooler Master CM 690 III. They are somewhat pricey, the Pro version which ships with rubber mounts more so, with the non-Pro models shipping in pairs. Read all about them in their review.

"I’m a big fan of magnets, they’re just plain cool. Corsair was attracted to the idea of using magnets in it’s latest fans and created the ML-Series. Sporting magnetic levitation, the ML Series fans are meant to be the last set of fans you’ll ever need. Maintaing both high performance and quiet operation, we take the ML120 and ML140 PRO LED fans for a spin."

George Hotz, aka [Geohot], created the comma.ai program in an effort to create and sell a program to control self driving cars. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration took offence to this, citing the possibility of this endangering humans in a letter sent to his company Comma.Ai. He shut down the project rather than having to deal with lawyers, red tape and regulations. The code survived however and is now available on GitHub. Hack a Day took a look and discovered it is written in Python with some C included and is rather easy to interpret if you are familiar with the language. It is compatible with Acura ILXs or Honda Civic 2016 Touring models, if you are so inclined.

"First there was [Geohot]’s lofty goal to build a hacker’s version of the self-driving car. Then came comma.ai and a whole bunch of venture capital. After that, a letter from the Feds and a hasty retreat from the business end of things. The latest development? comma.ai’s openpilot project shows up on GitHub!"

Details on Intel’s upcoming Z270 and H270 chipsets surfaced last month that fleshed out the new platform and its capabilities including the inclusion of additional PCI-E 3.0 lanes and out-of-the-box support for 7th Generation Intel Kaby Lake processors versus the current generation Z170 and H170 chipsets.

TechPowerUp reported that Intel’s 200-series chipsets – which would be used on motherboards with the LGA 1151 socket – would feature incremental improvements over their current generation equivalents including the upgrade to Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) version 15, support for Intel Optane Technology, and additional downstream PCI-E 3.0 lanes. The Z270 and H270 chipsets each have four extra lanes compared to their 100-series predecessors. These “downstream lanes” allow for additional high bandwidth connections that hang off the chipset (which does appear to still be ultimately limited by the physical four PCI-E 3.0 lanes that make up the DMI 3.0 link between the CPU and PCH). Examples include extra Thunderbolt, USB 3.1, and PCI-E slots for NICs, capture cards, storage controllers, or even graphics cards.

Intel Z270 Express will feature 14 general purpose PCI-E lanes versus 10 on Z170 Express along with a total lane budget of 30 versus 26 (16 of those lanes are reserved for CPU to one or two PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots (electrically 1x16 or 2x8) and the others come from the chipset but really connect back to the CPU over a DMI 3.0 link that is equivalent to four lanes of PCI-E 3.0. H270 also features 14 general purpose lanes versus what appears to be six on H170. H270 and H170 have 16 PCI-E 3.0 lanes coming from the CPU for graphics so it is a total lane budget of 30 versus 22 respectively.

Z270

Z170

H270

H170

High Speed IO (HSIO)

30

26

30

22

PCI-E 3.0 Lanes

24

20

20

16

Maximum M.2 slots

3

3

2

2

H270 will see the biggest benefit from the additional PCI-E lanes which could mean systems like HTPCs and budget desktops where overclocking and multi-GPU setups are not a concern using H270 chipset motherboards could still support a full range of external IO and fast storage.

One interesting thing I noticed from the table is that Z270 and H270 do not support additional M.2 slots. The maximum number of M.2 slots remains the same as their 100-series counterparts at three and two respectively. After talking with Allyn, this makes sense because of that limiting factor that is the four lane DMI 3.0 link to the CPU and memory. Specifically, he explained:

“Think of the chipset as a means of fanout to individual things that won't simultaneously consumer more than x4. You can use the extra lanes for other stuff, like additional USB 3.1 controllers, Ethernet, audio, etc. Heck, you can route them to the last PCIe slot if you wanted.”

Further, Intel will continue to differentiate the Z270 Express and H270 Express by supporting multiplier overclocking and multi-GPU setups solely on Z270-based motherboards. H270 will be single x16 slot boards that do not allow multiplier-based overclocking at best and more than likely any CPU overclocking. The tradeoff being that H270-based boards should be much cheaper.

Intel Optane support is compelling, but will not be a reason to upgrade quite yet as drives are still a ways off and when they do arrive are sure to be very expensive. Rumors do suggest that Intel may introduce a small 3D XPoint-based Optane SSD up to 32GB alongside the rollout of Kaby Lake and new motherboards but as that is not large enough for an OS drive it will remain more of a niche thing at first. As larger drives come out at lower price points, the support for them on Z270 and H270 would help make the case for enthusiasts running Z170 and H170 boards to make the jump.

Of course, that brings me to my main thought surrounding Z270 and H270 based motherboards which is that while someone looking to build a new PC could justify going straight to the newer chipset-based motherboards, users running existing Z170 and H170 motherboards – many of which will support Kaby Lake processors with a BIOS update – have little reason to jump at an upgrade. Budget builds might even justify going to the older and cheaper boards if they don’t need the new features and putting the saved money towards something like more memory or a better CPU cooler.

For the highest end (save HEDT) builds, Z270-based boards should offer more connectivity options for Thunderbolt and USB 3.1 ports and the ability to dive into XPoint storage when it fully rolls out is nice. There are arguments to be main on both sides.

What are your plans for Kaby Lake? Will you be upgrading to the new processor, and if so will be using a Z170/H170 or a new Z270/H270 board?

Thermaltake is readying the Tower 900 for launch later this month. Clad in all-black or snow white, the Tower 900 was designed in concert with Watermod France to be modder and liquid cooling friendly with a design that allows enthusiasts to show off their DIY builds.

The upcoming Tower 900 series is part of Thermaltake’s TT Premium line and is constructed using a “dismantlable module design” that allows builder to completely strip the case down to the frame to make modding the various panels and pants easier. The case used a neat dual chamber design that puts the PC components front and center and the liquid cooling, power supply, and storage devices behind the motherboard chamber.

The front chamber is surrounded on three sides by 5mm thick tempered glass and holds up to E-ATX motherboards vertically and supports 260mm high CPU coolers and 400mm long graphics cards. There are 8 PCI expansion slots. In addition to the motherboard, the front chamber holds two 3.5”/2.5" drive trays that are visible through the case windows, two hidden 2.5" SSD mounts, and up to two large coolant reservoirs. Thermaltake suggests that the Tower 900 would work well with dual loop systems, and I tend to agree. Modders will be able to put together some very nice looking builds, especially if they use rigid tubing.

Other features include large rounded case feet, a single 5.25” drive bay nestled in the bottom of the front panel, and four USB 3.0 and one audio jack for front panel I/O up top.

Around back, the Tower 900 hosts a standard ATX power supply, up to four 3.5” or 2.5” drives in a hard drive cage (though you give up some radiator capacity on the right side if you use the HDD cage), and up to an impressive 480mm or 560mm (depending on if its 120mm or 140mm fans) radiator on both the left and right sides! In theory you could have a 560mm radiator for your multi GPU setup on one loop and 360mm radiator for the CPU on a second loop along with all four hard drives or if you can get by with the two 2.5” drives in the front chamber your CPU could also have a 480/560mm radiator of its own.

If you are into air cooling, the Tower 900 supports a total of 13 120mm or 140mm fans. One fan in the front chamber above the SSD drive trays, four on the left, four and four on the right in the back chamber, and two fans each on the top and bottom.

For those curious, the case measures 29.6” x 16.7” x 19” and weighs 54 pounds. Once it is full of water and PC components, you should probably team lift this monster heh. Additional photos and videos can be found here.

The Thermaltake Tower 900 is currently up for pre-order and is slated to be available by mid-December in both all black and snow white for $249.99 with a full rollout in January.

It certainly looks nice, and I can see a lot of potential for custom PCs. I am looking forward to seeing the full reviews as well as what enthusiasts are able to do with it!

The Khronos Group is the standards body that maintains OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, along with several other APIs and formats. They are made up of several members, which include companies of various sizes along with educational institutions, with a couple of tiers where members of the higher level, Promoter, get board nomination rights.

The lower level, Contributor, has just received a new member: Razer. The Khronos Group published a little statement to their front page, but didn’t provide a way to permanently link it and the Read More just directs to Razer’s homepage. Also, Razer didn’t provide a press release on their website, at least by the time this news was published, so I included the statement below to prevent it from getting buried in a few days:

The Khronos Group is proud to announce that Razer has joined as a Contributor Member. Razer is a world leader in connected devices and software for gamers. Its award-winning design and technology span systems, peripherals, audio and wearable technologies. Razer co-founded OSVR, an open-source platform that integrates VR, AR and mixed reality hardware and software APIs that support a universal VR ecosystem.

Based on this, it’s easy to speculate that Razer is looking to have a say and a vote in how graphics APIs evolve, nudging it as needed for OSVR, their co-founded virtual reality platform. Basically every other VR developer worth mentioning is already a member, including Google, Microsoft, Oculus VR, Samsung, Sony, and Valve. Likewise, Vulkan is undergoing rapid development, and the next version, codenamed Vulkan Next, has VR as one of its “top priorities”. It seems like a good time for Razer to get involved.

Otherwise? Not much to speak of here. Razer is a fairly big company that wants to be active in technology development, and it can easily afford the Khronos Group membership fee. I mean, the amount they spent on USB ports with a specific shade of green would cover about twenty years of membership to the Khronos Group, so it seems within their reach.

The Dream Machines DM1 PRO S gaming mouse uses a Pixart PMW 3360 optical sensor, not one commonly utilized in the market. The DPI of the sensor can be toggled in set increments from 400 up to 12000, with the colour of the light under the logo indicating your current setting; the lack of software precludes manipulation of those presets. The overall design of the mouse looks ambidextrous, however there are only thumb buttons on the left side of the mouse. TechPowerUp were very impressed with the performance of the new sensor, as to the rest of the features you will just have to pop over and read them yourself.

"A few months ago, we reviewed the Dream Machines DM1 PRO, and Dream Machines is now back with the DM1 PRO S. This version has an updated sensor, has been slimmed down to be even lighter, and has a rather nice glossy finish. Improvements, which could be a game changer."

Ryan has started cracking the whip but we haven't quite assembled our picks for the Christmas season so for now you can check out what the gang at The Tech Report has on offer. As you might expect, the HTC Vive appears but you might not have suspected that a pressure cooker and sous-vide machine are on their list. There is a lot more in the way of recommendations, from a CPU delidder to a projector or a 55" 4K TV with HDR if you are more of a traditionalist. Hide your credit cards and check out the whole list.

"The TR staff knows just how hard it can be to find the right gift to please the nerd in your life, so we've compiled a list of the items we've used and enjoyed over the past year. If you're stuck on what to buy for your favorite techie this holiday season, maybe we can help."

Introduction and First Impressions

Aukey, a prominent seller of mobile accessories on Amazon, has an interesting product for PC enthusiasts: an RGB mechanical gaming keyboard for $59.99. The price is definitely right, but is it any good? We’ll take a look!

“The AUKEY KM-G3 mechanical keyboard takes the gaming experience to a new level. Tactile, responsive mechanical keys put you in control for an outstanding typing or gaming experience. The KM-G3 offers preloaded multi-color RGB backlit lighting effects and patterns. Ideal for FPS, CF, COD, LOL and Racing games - Just use the Function key to easily switch between gaming presets.”

The KM-G3 keyboard is a standard 104-key design, using blue switches (presumably a generic switch as no brand is listed), and there is RGB lighting which can be cycled between various colors and patterns, or switched off if desired. Aukey is also offering a 2-year warranty on the keyboard, which should help allay any fear about a purchase.

Someone, who wasn’t Intel, seeded Tom’s Hardware an Intel Core i7-7700k, which is expected for release in the new year. This is the top end of the mainstream SKUs, bringing four cores (eight threads) to 4.2 GHz base, 4.5 GHz boost. Using a motherboard built around the Z170 chipset, they were able to clock the CPU up to 4.8 GHz, which is a little over 4% higher than the Skylake-based Core i7-6700k maximum overclock on the same board.

Before we continue, these results are based on a single sample. (Update: @7:01pm -- Also, the motherboard they used has some known overclock and stability issues. They mentioned it a bit in the post, like why their BCLK is 99.65MHz, but I forgot to highlight it here. Thankfully, Allyn caught it in the first ten minutes.) This sample has retail branding, but Intel would not confirm that it performs like they expect a retail SKU would. Normally, pre-release products are labeled as such, but there’s no way to tell if this one part is some exception. Beyond concerns that it might be slightly different from what consumers will eventually receive, there is also a huge variation in overclocking performance due to binning. With a sample size of one, we cannot tell whether this chip has an abnormally high, or an abnormally low, defect count, which affects both power and maximum frequency.

That aside, if this chip is representative of Kaby Lake performance, users should expect an increase in headroom for clock rates, but it will come at the cost of increased power consumption. In fact, Tom’s Hardware states that the chip “acts like an overclocked i7-6700K”. Based on this, it seems like, unless they want an extra 4 PCIe lanes on Z270, Kaby Lake’s performance might already be achievable for users with a lucky Skylake.

I should note that Tom’s Hardware didn’t benchmark the iGPU. I don’t really see it used for much more than video encoding anyway, but it would be nice to see if Intel improved in that area, seeing as how they incremented the model number. Then again, even users who are concerned about that will probably be better off just adding a second, discrete GPU anyway.

Depending on which model you order, the MSI Aegis Ti PC will have an i7-6700K or i5-6600K and a pair of either GTX 1080s or 1070s. The model which shipped to TechPowerUp for testing sported a pair of M.2 Samsung 950 PROs and 32GB of DDR4-2400, along with the i7-6700K and GTX 1080s of course. The unique looking enclosure is VR Ready, in that there are USB and HDMI ports in the front to let you easily attach your VR goggles and is more than powerful enough to power said device at high settings. If you would prefer to spend $3000 on a configured gaming rig with some interesting features as opposed to building one yourself, pop over for a look at the full review.

"MSI sent us their latest fully featured PC, the Aegis Ti, to take a look at. This PC departs from the "traditional box" design in a big way and is ready to support not just one but two GTX 1080s! It's VR ready, including an HDMI port in front and dual M.2 drives, which can be configured in RAID, making it ready for whatever you want to throw at it."

Having already looked at AMD's performance with two RX 480's in a system, the recent patch which enables support for multiple NVIDIA GPUs have dragged [H]ard|OCP back into the game. Lacking a pair of Titan X cards, they tested the performance of a pair of GTX 1080s and 1070s; the GTX 1060 will not be receiving support from Croteam. It would seem that adding a second Pascal card to your system will benefit you, however the scaling they saw was nowhere near as impressive as with the AMD RX 480 which saw a 36% boost. Check out the full results here and yes ... in this case the m in mGPU indicates multiple GPUs, not mobile.

"Serious Sam VR was the first commercial enthusiast gaming title to include multi-GPU support with AMD's RX 480 GPU. Now the folks at Croteam have added mGPU support for NVIDIA cards as well. We take a look at how well NVIDIA's VRSLI technology fares in this VR shooter title."

Is Bitlocker cramping your voyeuristic cravings and preventing you from snooping on your loved ones or strangers? Assuming you do not instead seek medical help for your problem, all you need to do is wait for Windows to perform a version update and for the user to get bored and walk away. Hop onto their machine and press SHIFT+F10 to get a command prompt which will be running at root privileges and take advantage of the fact that Windows disables Bitlocker while installing an updated version of Windows. This will not work for all updates, it needs to be a major OS update such as the move to Anniversary Edition which changes the version of Windows installed on the machine.

Microsoft is working on a fix, in the meantime sticking with Windows Long Term Service Branch or slighly modifying how updates are pushed via WSUS or SCCM will ensure this vulnerability cannot be leveraged. You can also take the simple measure of sticking around when major updates occur. Pop over to Slashdot for more information.

"This [update procedure] has a feature for troubleshooting that allows you to press SHIFT + F10 to get a Command Prompt," Laiho writes on his blog. "The real issue here is the Elevation of Privilege that takes a non-admin to SYSTEM (the root of Windows) even on a BitLocker (Microsoft's hard disk encryption) protected machine." Laiho informed Microsoft of the issue and the company is apparently working on a fix."

The holidays are fully in swing and Corsair is in the giving mood. To celebrate the launch of the brand new, limited edition RM1000i White Special Edition power supply, Corsair has sent along one for us to give away to our readers!

CORSAIR®, a world leader in enthusiast memory, high-performance gaming hardware and PC components, today reached two new milestones, celebrating ten years since first entering the PSU market and the sale of the ten millionth CORSAIR PSU.

Over the past decade, CORSAIR has revolutionized the enthusiast PSU industry with an unrelenting commitment to product quality and innovation that has seen the PSU evolve from an after-thought into the high-quality heart of a modern PC. CORSAIR has championed a range of key features to push PC power supplies to new levels of performance, functionality and customization. Modular PSUs have made building PCs easier, Zero RPM fan mode allows the PSU’s fan to switch off entirely under low loads and with digitally controlled power and CORSAIR LINK PSU monitoring, users can find out exactly how their PSU is performing in an instant.

To commemorate this achievement, CORSAIR is proud to announce the extremely limited CORSAIR RM1000i Special Edition. Individually numbered, finished in striking arctic white and equipped with both a white LED-lit cooling fan and new individually sleeved white cables, only 100 of these PSUs will be built, giving enthusiasts a chance to own a unique piece of CORSAIR history.

Ten years has seemingly flown by and selling 10 million power supplies to consumers is no small feat! If you want to get your hands on one of only 100 of these special items, then enter for your chance to win one with the contest below!